Torture and traitors to the cause

No court. No Jury. No warrant. No judge oversight. No record of arrest. The accusations against you are never revealed and the evidence against you never disclosed.

You are not subject to the rights granted by the U.S. Constitution or any other humanitarian document regarding your treatment.

Held indefinitely and never knowing where you are, who has you, why, or what they are going to do to you next. Housed in a secret prison in a country off the political map.

We took no prisoners ... only enemy combatants and detainees. Not-so-cleverly redefined terms that allow one political maneuvering when confronted with violations of foreign treaties and our own domestic laws – the ones specifically designed to restrict these kinds of centralizing policies and preserve human rights. Torturing is welcomed into practice under the double-speaking guise of “enhanced interrogation technique.”

Welcome to the United States of America’s way of doing things in the fanatic wake of September 11.

The CIA adopted methods long condemned by the American government in 2002. Its techniques were inspired by an old U.S. military training program which designed its original practices after those of the Soviet Union.

If you kill a bound prisoner, even under orders, you are a coward and a traitor. If you mock drown him hundreds of times, even if you’re wearing a uniform, you are a coward and a traitor. If you hold a power drill to a beaten man’s temple and tell him you’re going to kill his children, even if it’s for the alleged “greater good,” you are a coward and a traitor. (All things alleged in memos involving CIA-sanctioned interrogations).

The argument to defend these actions is gruesomely identical in dimension to that of a Nazi guard claiming ignorance after serving his country faithfully in a death camp.

If you are a person who is willing to torture another human being, I consider you to be the enemy of all things dear to me personally.

Freedom, self-determination, civic virtue and duty – all these things have always been more threatened by state-sanctioned torture than they have ever been by any terrorist.

An organization that aids in the torment of a human being that ends in a butchered death in some dark third-world country interrogation center is probably not one that’s going to be very forthcoming with their actions to the public.

They admit what they can’t deny and deny what they can’t admit.

Any CIA agent, American soldier or Blackwater mercenary who has committed these offenses, even in a dire times of war, should be prosecuted and so should any leaders in a command system that consciously neglected or openly condoned such actions.

The tie-wearing American men and women who stood in those concrete cells while their foreign counterparts were allowed to excruciate the lives of others now walk the halls of our government’s most prestigious buildings, contributing to policy and the security culture. They still now, as they did then, collect paychecks cashed out by federal tax dollars.

I don’t know what the extent of these horrors are, but I do know that substantial evidence has come forward to give more than enough just cause to launch several in-depth investigations.

I’m glad investigations have finally been put in motion. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Prosecutor John H. Durham are now looking into the CIA’s destruction of recorded interrogation videotapes. Their findings will determine the scope of the eventual investigation.

These are atrocities perpetrated by our country and make no doubt history has recorded them as they are. We are already guilty of failing to prevent them; do we really want the next shameful pages of our children’s’ American history books to record our apathetic view as a society?

I for one will, at the very least, take my contempt for these unpunished crimes to my grave.

I do not believe you can protect a country by betraying the founding principles for which it stands. Every act of blatant disregard against our ideals only serves as an assault upon them, and over time the loss of these moral conflicts threatens to undo them all together.

I feel the sense of our country’s moral legitimacy was stolen by our over reaction to the 9/11 event. Now I naively ponder the true meaning if the ideals written in our laws, the letters etched in stone on so many public buildings and even the words in our pledge of allegiance. How will the next generation be affected by this generation’s hypocrisy?